An Early Look At Ragnar Tornquist's The Secret World 54
At the recent Penny Arcade Expo, Funcom revealed a ton of new information on The Secret World, an MMO being designed by Ragnar Tornquist that's aiming to buck several of the genre's common trends. Tornquist also spoke later about several of the game's features and some of the design philosophy that they're working with. The game does not have a traditional class or leveling system. Instead, players gather the powers they want to use and align themselves with various factions of their choosing. "We want you to feel part of a world where the conspiracies are so dense and the politics is so thick that, when you join the secret society as a novice at the very beginning, it's this vast organization, and you'll have no idea how it works initially." PvP will be largely segregated from PvE, and new players will be able to contribute in fights that involve more experienced players. Funcom released some concept art and in-game screenshots for The Secret World to go along with a new cinematic trailer.
Re:We're making our MMO do blah... like EVE (Score:4, Informative)
EVE is IMHO very well designed that way. At least better than the current "standard" MMO formula where you grind to gain levels, have to choose a class and end up with some cookie cutter build if you want to be competitive.
This said, newer MMOs already start being more flexible in that regard. Perfect World and Fallen Earth have a mixed level/skill system where you get some progress based on level, but you also get additional skill points for customizing your character's build. Fallen Earth in particular seems to give out enough of these to raise two specializations to a high level.
Now the The Secret World seems to have yet another approach with plenty of freedom to build your character. Sounds good but I'll wait how it turns out before praising it. The developers of Fallen Earth promised a similar degree of freedom but delivered only halfway.
Funcom (Score:2, Informative)
Re:console philosophy (Score:1, Informative)
And Shadowrun, man. They made a damn FPS from one of the richest pen and paper RPG setting ever created ! That was almost criminal ...
Re:We're making our MMO do blah... like EVE (Score:3, Informative)
The difference is that Secret World is aiming to make their game a game.
Oh, and UO was classless and Shadowbane had politics and territory control long before Eve did either of these things.